


On the Dark Great Sea

by draculard



Category: Ex Machina (2015)
Genre: Body Horror, Car Accidents, Gen, Hypothetical Animal Death, Minor canonical character death, Self Harm, thought experiments
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-30 16:04:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20099902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: Humans, Caleb tells her, are programmed to find patterns in everything.Later, he wishes he'd used a different word.





	On the Dark Great Sea

Metal screeches louder than anything during a car crash. It blocks all other sounds from your ears. One moment you’re hearing tires on a road and static on a radio and the next all that’s wiped out. 

Caleb wakes to that sound. He wakes to it even when he isn’t sleeping. He’s hypnotized by street lights blipping into view, bright spots of paint on a canvas made of asphalt, and when he looks into the front seat he sees his mom’s head turned to the right. Watching his dad, not the road. 

In Nathan’s smarthouse, Caleb’s bedroom is filled with sounds. Air circulating through the vents and puffed out from a humidifier he can’t locate. Humming of lights, of computers, of fiber-optic cables hidden in the walls. There’s enough white noise to lull anyone to sleep.

But he hears metal screeching.

* * *

Ava’s not a fan of philosophy. She finds these concepts difficult to grasp. What she likes are questions without answers, and open-ended scenarios designed to make her think. Nathan gives her one she doesn’t like, about a wine glass filled with marbles. He calls it a _ gedankenexperiment_. 

Caleb gives her one she likes a little better. It goes like this:

You’re on the beach, and when a wave comes in the water’s cold and laps up over your toes. You feel the sand beneath you, soft and wet. When the water drags away, it leaves behind a goldfish.

_ There are no goldfish in the ocean, _she says.

_ Why not? _ says Caleb, smiling.

_ They’re freshwater fish. _

_ And this is a freshwater ocean. _

He shrugs, like it’s that simple. There are no freshwater oceans. An estuary, Ava decides, but she doesn’t share this with Caleb.

It goes like this:

The goldfish is translucent. You can see right through its scales to all the bones and organs underneath. And just behind the goldfish’s gills, you see a marble.

_ That’s where its heart should be. _

_ I know, _ says Caleb. _ That’s the point. _

You take the marble out. The goldfish is dead and you have to shred its skin off to get to it. You have scales stuck beneath your fingernails, hard and slimy. And when you’ve got the marble in your hand, you wipe it off on your shirt and turn it over, holding it up in the red light of the sun.

There’s a number on the marble. What number is it?

_ You’re asking me, _ Ava says. He watches her; he doesn’t say yes or no. _ It’s the number three, _ Ava says.

It goes like this:

The number on the marble is three. You put it in your jeans pocket — yes, you’re wearing jeans — and drop the fish carcass to the beach just as another wave comes in. It swallows up the gutted goldfish. It washes over your feet, sweeps the sand right off your toes.

_ Why a marble? _ Ava asks. _ Nathan used marbles, too. _

_ I don’t know, _ Caleb says. _ Maybe there’s something about marbles that appeals to scientific minds. _ He doesn’t ask her about Nathan’s marbles. Maybe he doesn’t catch the connection.

_ Did you read about this in a book? _asks Ava.

_ No. _

He doesn’t call them gedankenexperiments. He calls them thought experiments. It goes like this:

When the wave recedes into the freshwater ocean, you see another goldfish lying by your feet. The one you pulled the marble from is gone. But this one is translucent, too, and it has a marble where its heart should be, and you pull the marble out of it and hold it to the light.

What does it say?

What does the one in your pocket say?

Check your pocket to make sure. Is there a pattern here? Humans can always find patterns. What’s the pattern?

Drop the goldfish carcass.

Wait for the wave.

* * *

_ The fish is translucent, _ Ava says when he’s about to leave. _ You don’t need to peel its skin away to read the marble. Even if the number is facing away from you, you could just turn the fish over. You could view it from the other side. _

Caleb is silent. She watches him, but she cannot read his face.

_ I hadn’t thought of that, _ he says.

* * *

His father is thrown from the car, straight through the windshield, and when Caleb lurches out of the backseat, he thinks for a moment that Dad is okay, that he’s just unconscious, that his body is fine.

His hands are on his father’s shirt when the ambulance comes. It’s an old shirt, faded. Dad bought it years and years ago at a B.B. King concert, and it’s washed-out now, but he can still discern the line of a Sharpie where B.B. King himself signed it. It was in Mom’s hands, then. Dad bought it, but he gave it to her to take it to King, and Caleb remembers what Dad has always claimed he said — that if a beautiful young woman asked for an autograph, maybe King would kiss her right there onstage, where everyone could see.

Mom said later it was a miscalculation on Dad’s part. Maybe he meant to be charming. Maybe he meant to be gallant. Neither Mom nor Caleb could ever figure it out; it just came off as weird, abnormal, and now Dad is lying on the asphalt, and it’s just rained, and the back of his shirt is getting wet.

The paramedics put their hands on Caleb’s shoulders. They pull him away. His fingers are twisted still, curled in the fabric of Dad’s old shirt, and when they pull him he keeps holding on.

The shirt comes off in his hands. The back is shredded; it peels off Dad’s chest like paper.

It’s wet with blood.

* * *

_ There is no pattern, _Ava says.

_ Of course there is. _

_ I chose the numbers, _ Ava says, chin tilting. _ If there were a pattern, I devised it myself. And I say there’s no pattern. _

He asks her to recite the numbers on the marbles and she does, remembering them perfectly, even though on the beach there are no marbles in her jeans pocket.

_ And you don’t see a pattern? _Caleb asks when she is done.

_ There isn’t one. _

_ Humans always see patterns, _Caleb says.

* * *

He watches her when she enters Nathan’s bedroom. He watches her peel the skin off an older model of herself and affix it to her ribs. Hands to skin, skin to ribs. 

When he was young, when he first invented the goldfish experiment in his hospital bed, it went like this:

You see a translucent goldfish on the beach with a marble nested in its ribs.

Goldfish don’t have ribs. He didn’t know that then; he didn’t know that till he mentioned it to a nurse and she corrected him, and then he furiously looked it up — on Blue Book, actually — and studied a little diagram with his eyebrows furrowed, refusing to admit he’d made a mistake.

Behind the gills, then, he decided. Where its heart should be.

That’s where the marble is.

* * *

The razor slices through his skin perfectly on the first try, because he exerts far more pressure than he needs to. 

He knows it won’t kill him. There are a lot of things that won’t kill him, and what he’s learned is that dying from blood loss takes an awful long time, and an awful lot of blood. What runs out of him over the bathroom sink is minimal. It’s nothing to him; it’s water dyed red by Moses before the pharaoh and his magicians; it’s a translucent goldfish in a freshwater ocean.

He parts the skin with his fingers, feeling for something underneath. Gel, maybe. Titanium.

Marbles.

He feels nothing. He senses no pattern.

He hears the screeching of metal in his ears.


End file.
